Month: October 2015

So this had me baffled for a bit. For using Angular’s $resource in your Angular service, you map it to a particular URL with (optional) parameters defined for that URL. Then how can you have multiple resources with their own unique URLs mapped in the same service?

For example, here’s a service called User which maps to the URL “/api/users/…”:

As you can see, there’s one resource in this service that maps to the one URL, so then how can I add another URL for the $resource?

The answer turned out to be pretty simple, actually. What you have to do is create an object (JSON) of $resources that are returned for the service. You can have individual elements inside the object that each map to a different $resource. So, for example:

In the above example, in the “User” service, we have two resources that can be accessed. To access “changePassword”, we can use User.WithId.changePassword (which maps to a particular URL), and to access “generateResetPasswordToken” we use User.Misc.generateResetPasswordToken (which maps to another URL).

The example I’ll use applies specifically to Vaadin, for when the loading bar is shown if the server is taking too long. However, the same CSS styling I’ll use can be applied to any pseudo div.

When Vaadin loads a page (or a “view”), and if the page takes too long to load, there’s some client side JavaScript and CSS that Vaadin pre-loads, which displays a loading bar or progress bar. This bar progresses forward, from left to right, at the top of the page, under the “URL” area of your browser. And it eventually goes away when the page loads. This gives the user the indication that something is happening and they should wait.

If the page takes too long to load, this bar eventually starts blinking. And if the server is stuck (had a hiccup somewhere), this bar just blinks forever. After some waiting, more adept users eventually realize it will never load and they refresh the page which usually resolves the issue. However less tech-savvy users don’t know what to do at that point. So we set up a small message box (a pseudo div) that floats under the loading bar, which tells the user to refresh the page. This is kind of like what the GMail web app does when there’s a network issue.

First of all, to set up the pseudo div, we add the following to our theme’s scss (SASS) file that Vaadin uses:

“v-loading-indicator-wait” is the style Vaadin gives to the loading bar which shows up after a certain amount of waiting while the server is processing the request. So to show our floating div with the loading message, we can use the ::after (v-loading-indicator-wait::after), as indicated above.

The problem is, that the v-loading-indicator-wait is added after just a number of seconds of waiting (around ~5), and showing the floating div would be too soon. So the best way (or at least an easy way) to do it is to use animation to delay when it is added.

You can define the animation to “fade in” the div (from being invisible to visible) after a certain number of seconds, like so:

And viola. The floating div doesn’t show up until about 12 seconds after the “v-loading-indicator-wait” is added, which is about 5 seconds after a request is initiated and the server hasn’t responded. So that’s a total of 17 seconds between the user initiated the request and till when the message shows, which I believe is enough waiting time to realize the server may never respond.

So I’ve been working on a personal project using the MEAN stack (MongoDB, ExpressJS, AngularJS and NodeJS)! The nerd in me has been pretty excited to learn something completely new and different. I’ve never done full-stack development strictly in JavaScript, and so far I’m finding it to be pretty neat. I’ll be making posts about things I struggle with, or find useful, as I progress.

Anyway, I used the DaftMonk AngularJS full-stack yeoman generator (https://github.com/DaftMonk/generator-angular-fullstack) for my project seed. I definitely recommend it if you’re starting out fresh with MEAN (or even if you’re not), since it speeds up the initial setup and development immensely.

My problem arose as I was wiring up some post-processing to be done after a user logged in. In the login controller (login.controller.js), after the login function is called from the Auth service, there is a function in “.then()” that is called upon success.

However, even though the user has logged in, the user data is not available yet! So, you cannot access the current user’s data properties (such as their role) through Auth.getCurrentUser() (for example the Auth.getCurrentUser().role field will be undefined). This is due to the fact that the data is loaded asynchronously (I’m still trying to get the hang of how that works).

The way around this is to use the Auth.isLoggedInAsync(…callback…) function. The callback sent to isLoggedInAsync is called after the user has finally been loaded, which will guarantee your post-login-processing code being executed after the data for the user is available.